Liquid crystal displays are classified into a transmissive display, a reflective display and a transflective display.
In the transmissive display, no mirror is provided on back side of the screen and light is only emitted from the backlight source, therefore, it has excellent performance in the environment with weak light or without light. However, when being outdoors in the sunshine or in strong light, the brightness of backlight will be seriously insufficient, and in this case, if simply increasing the brightness of the backlight to improve the performance of the display, the power consumption will increase quickly and the effect is not desired.
The reflective display has a mirror at the backside of its screen and displays relying on an external light source, thus better display effect and contrast may be realized outdoors and in strong light. However, it is difficult for the reflective display to display images with high contrast and color quality in a case of high resolution, especially difficult to meet the full color requirements. When the ambient light is insufficient, the contrast and brightness of the reflective display will greatly deteriorate.
Currently, a conventional transflective display is designed by combining designs of the transmissive display and the reflective display, that is, the conventional transflective display comprises both a backlight source and a mirror, therefore, when operating, the transflective display may use not only the backlight source of its own but also an external light source, thus better viewing effect may be provided to users no matter in strong light or in darkness. However, in the conventional transflective display, a layer of reflective material is coated on half area of each pixel so that one half of each pixel is used for transmission and the other half of each pixel is used for reflection, therefore, utilization of each pixel of the conventional transflective display is only half of that of the reflective display or the transmissive display, which leads to low utilization of light energy. Furthermore, in the conventional transflective display, as it is necessary to coat part of each pixel for reflection with reflective material, thus pixel structure is changed and fabricating process thereof becomes more complex accordingly.